


Understanding the Source Material

by FluffKills



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: And the Glitra is all pining, Bow is super supportive but a terrible beta reader, Canon Compliant, Catradora is canon still guys, Characters Writing Fanfiction, F/F, F/M, Glimmer wrote like 400k of AU fanfictions based on Roll with It, Minor Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Multi, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27716863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FluffKills/pseuds/FluffKills
Summary: Glimmer used to love to write, especially stories about her very original and cool heroine Shimmer and her cat stroking nemesis Felina. Stumbling across the works now, though, was an exercise in humiliation. They're so corny and repetitive. And worst of all, the inspiration for Felina lives with them now, and she'snothinglike her character.~~~bit of glitra pining for all the fans, blame discord for this
Relationships: Bow/Glimmer (She-Ra), Catra/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 65





	Understanding the Source Material

“Glimmer, I found another one of your…” Bow calls, pulling out a tattered box from where it was hidden at the back of a drawer. Flushing, Glimmer pops over and yanks it from his hands. 

“Thank YOU…!” she says, dumping it in the ever growing pile. The sheer volume was starting to get embarrassing, as if the contents were bad enough. He gives her a sheepish, affectionate grin, and her heart warms. Sighing, she goes back to her own corner of the room. 

Bow has been living in a guest room at the palace for years. Even after they returned from the war, the pair slipped into their old routine. Bow staying in his room, Glimmer staying in hers, and then slipping at night out to see each other for quality time. At least, until Catra caught Glimmer in the act last week, exiting Bow's quarters before sunrise, and teased her for _days_. Catra and Adora, in contrast, had moved into the same room the instant Bright Moon was back to normal without a second thought. It had been humiliating to be taunted as if they were sneaking around (like anyone would have cared) but it _did_ give them both the push they needed to finally sort this out.

So now, Glimmer’s drawers and walk-in closet are open and they’re sorting through to make space for Bow’s clothes to join hers. It’s a lot of effort, but it also fills her with a cozy warmth to just think of it. The whole thing would be delightfully domestic if it wasn’t for Glimmer’s dirty secret. 

And she can’t even call it a secret, not from Bow, not really. But it wasn’t exactly something she was proud of. She’d even shared it with Adora a couple of times, before her friend stopped showing any interest in that side of her. It was embarrassing, honestly, but Perfuma admitted privately once that nearly every teenager had done the same at some time, and that Glimmer needn’t feel bad about it. It was hard not to, though, when confronted with how many there were, hidden around her bedroom.

The stories.

Not just any stories, her _special_ stories, the ones about her incredibly cool character Shimmer and her awesome battles with the devious temptress Felina. Sometimes they’d include her friends as side characters to be rescued or to help her heroine, but often they weren’t. After all, the best part was the interactions between Shimmer and her nemesis, especially in the stories where Shimmer was captured and at the evil villain’s mercy for just long enough….

Glimmer shakes her head and smacks her flushed cheeks a few times to get that image out of her brain. That aspect also wasn’t a secret from Bow, though Glimmer’s glad Adora never got to see those particular stories. In retrospect, she wonders if Adora saw through her cleverly constructed façade for the characters. Bow certainly had, but didn’t mind reading through her work. He was always very positive too, supportive and kind, even when the contents of the stories made him flustered.

And then things… changed for them all. After the portal opened, Glimmer put aside that fun fantasy world. She remembers returning to her room and seeing a half-finished story on her desk on the evening of her coronation. Even looking at the work made her stomach ache and bile rise in her throat, but she couldn’t bear to destroy all of it. Instead, she pushed them into the hidden corners of her mind, and of her room. By dawn, it was like it had never existed at all. Like she’d never thought the woman who’d _killed her mother_ was just a fun, playful character to put into silly stories. Because that was the greatest shame over her soul. Catra was a real person, and Glimmer had been so, so wrong about her, but she never _cared_ until that dark day because Catra was _so hot._

Honestly, until today, she hadn’t even thought about most of her really old stuff. It’s tempting to flip through some of them, the yellowing pages with their faded purple ink in her younger self’s handwriting, all curls. Laugh at how different it all turned out. 

Giving her head a final shake, she pushes the stack to one side and grabs an old pantsuit she can’t even remember wearing. It’s a horrible shade of green. Probably a gift from Auntie Casta, who loved that colour and couldn’t fathom it not suiting her niece. Holding it up for Bow, she frowns, the pout drawing her eyebrows together. 

“Should I even bother keeping this?” she asks him. He looks over, and glances between it and her.

“Yeeeeenoooo… no. Probably not.” he admits, and she nods.

“‘Burn it’, got you.” Glimmer translates, chucking it in her discards. Bow blanches, and squawks “ _Don’t burn it!_ ” and she laughs and laughs. 

* * *

“So, what are we going to do with all these?” 

Glimmer looks up from where she’s wrestling with the sheets for their new, larger bed. It was amazing how much room there was now that they’d cleared out all the stuff Glimmer had acquired over the years. Bow was able to move in all his outfits and weapons with room to spare, and helpful servants had spirited away the rest. A small puzzled frown crosses her lips as Glimmer wonders what could possibly be left. She’d been looking forward to breaking in the bed and doesn’t want to do any more damn cleaning.

Bow’s standing by the mound of stories, except it wasn’t a mound anymore. He’d neatly stacked them, and placed them on her desk. Rubbing the back of his neck, he glances up at her, and her heart melts at how much the man who inspired the Rebellion and the love of her life looks like he did as a kid. So shy and sweet. 

“I hope you’re not going to say you want to burn them, too,” he says, his words gentle, and Glimmer’s brows shoot up into her hairline. Hopping down, she laughs, reaching for his hand and giving it a squeeze. Squeezing back, his smile grows. 

“Bow, are you saying you want your girlfriend to keep all her dumb stories where she wanted to bone the woman who kept trying to kill us?” A smile quirks her lips, and her tone grows playful, but there’s a lump of lead in her stomach, a tingling fear. Chuckling, Bow’s broad hand cups her cheek, and Glimmer leans into the touch. It’s so warm and reassuring, grounding as always.

“Well, in case you forgot, I _liked_ your stories. Even...well, those ones. I’m just saying it’d be a shame to get rid of them. _And_ Shimmer was my favourite character,” he adds, kissing over the worried wrinkle threatening to form between her eyebrows. Glimmer’s grin widens.

“She better be. She was the coolest.”

“Oh, don’t worry, she was. She still is.” Bow says, and they both laugh. Glimmer’s so happy they’re finally doing this. She’s really looking forward to waking up beside him tomorrow, not on cots or bedrolls or before she slips out to her own room, but just together. Bow hugs her, before pulling back.

“Tell you what, why don’t I, I don’t know, make a nice box or something. To put them all in. That way they’ll be safe for when you do feel like reading them in the future.” he suggests, and Glimmer can’t believe how good he is. He’s just honestly the best, and always has been. She rewards that idea with a quick kiss, hugging him again. 

“Okay, that sounds like a plan. In fact, that sounds like a request I should put to my official royal technomancer and master engineer, so get on it.” she says, smiling up at him. He sneaks an arm out for a playful salute.

“Yes ma’am!” 

* * *

Glimmer hadn’t really expected to ever look at her stories again. They were from a distant past, a strange, younger Glimmer who lived and dreamed so much differently. But Bow was taking her playful order very seriously and instead of just throwing something together for the papers, he was designing something special. It was apparently elaborate and he refused to show her the plans before it was done. So the stack lived on her desk, day after day. A damning indictment of her childish self. 

Doubly damning because Catra is nothing at all like who Glimmer built her up to be in her mind. Not before the portal, when she was sexy and mysterious and frustrating. Not after, when she was a selfish, horrible monster. The Catra in her life now was so much more than anything Glimmer could have imagined. Sharp and witty, playful and fun, even soft when she thought no one was looking. Even in the few months since the end of the war, Catra'd grown so much. Or maybe she'd always been like that, waiting for the right time and the right people to bring that out in her. 

It was with that thought in mind that Glimmer finally forced herself to look at her writing. Just to see how off she’d been. The first one made her laugh out loud, alone in her room, lit only by her desk lamp. She’d been so, so wrong, giving Catra that accent, and the heels. And did she make Felina say meow? What the fuck was she thinking?! The cat with the eyepatch though, that was gold, she’s glad she put him in. The first story was short, with an extremely hopeful ‘and the saga will continue!’ on the bottom, and it’s easy enough to move on to the second, equally brief one. It took her awhile to get comfortable with writing, going from a few hundred rushed words, to a few thousand, until finally her elaborate tales had actual chapters, with names and everything.

Glimmer finds herself going down the stack, smiling and laughing, gasping and blushing. The stories were over the top, bold and brassy, and Shimmer’s moves were great. She finds herself wishing she’d been more creative with them, though. In some cases, real life Glimmer’s moves ended up being even _more_ cool than her blatant self insert. Having incorporated magic into her actual fights, Glimmer can see a lot of room for flair, and soon she’s making notes, scribbling particular spells that would have worked. 

The sex was another place she can see she’d been lacking. The writing was steamy, especially when young Glimmer gave in to it. When she moved from pages and pages of tension and innuendo and finally let herself just put what she _really_ wanted on the page. Reading it with the distance of time, though, Glimmer can plainly see where she just guessed the details, or parroted things that she’d read in other stories. Hot, but weirdly clumsy and impersonal. Flicking through, Glimmer skims the later works, but it looks like she stopped writing the filth before Bow and her started fooling around. Or maybe that’s why she stopped having to flood her hormones onto the page. That was another thing to put into her notes.

But the hardest thing to read was just how _basic_ it all was. Felina was always the bad guy, always this close to being caught before escaping. Shimmer was always cool and great. Even the times Glimmer wrote her as captured by the forces of evil, she was always in control, and always broke free at just the right time. The banter was fun, but repetitive. The plots were basically the same with different coats of paint. Her lips tighten.

“Is this _really_ all I wanted?” she murmurs. A moth flits around her lamp, silently, casting shadows across the words. Sighing, she straightens the stack, returning it to its initial neatness. Her pen rolls over her lips as she absently chews the end, an old habit that made her mom scream. 

She supposes, back then, that really _was_ all she wanted. To be cool, respected, in control of her magic and with the attention of the hot enemy that, truth be told, was always _Adora’s_ nemesis, not hers. Even her mother was collateral damage to that, a mistake, a shock, an unintended consequence. These stories were her fantasies, how she always wished things had gone. The danger was never too dangerous, but fun and exciting, with a villain who was sultry and intriguing.

Glimmer can only imagine what these stories, these outlets for her hopes and dreams, would have become if she’d kept writing them. If she’d taken up her pen again after her mother’s death. Dark screeds of vengeance, dripping with blood? Felina turned into a larger than life evil that only Shimmer could destroy? Would that have helped her deal with all those feelings, or would it have just reinforced a different fantasy, where everything that happens has a greater meaning.

Rubbing the butt of her hand over her eyes, she wipes away the tears threatening to form in the corners. Those weren’t her feelings about Catra, though. Not anymore. Glimmer of a year ago is almost equally as unrecognizable to Glimmer now as Catra a year ago would be. They’d both changed so much in that time. 

But it would have been nice, wouldn’t it, if things had changed a little differently? Maybe earlier, when they first ended up caught by Prime. Or maybe if she’d been able to….

Pulling her pen from her mouth, still damp, she tugs open a drawer to find a new, clean sheet of paper. After a long moment, the familiar scratch of writing fills the silent room.

* * *

Glimmer is done with dealing with people in her official capacity for the day. Yanking off her tiara, she groans, looking at the impassive guards around the throne room before giving them a terse nod. She could walk out, but she does not want to risk even the slightest chance of being intercepted by someone with yet another form or letter for her. Lucky for her, unlike most officials, she can just go to her room without the danger of more work being pressed into her hands. With a pop and tingle, she’s surrounded by the comforting softness of her bedroom, and she can feel the tension unravel from her spine. Finally, she has time for herself.

Turning, she yelps as she sees Catra sitting akimbo on her bed, deeply engrossed the papers around her. Clutching her heart, she waits for it to stop pounding. 

“Fuck! Catra, you can’t just hang out in my room like this.” The woman waves a ream of forms at her, and Glimmer snatches them from her hands, groaning as she flips through them before tossing them on her desk. 

“Like you ever care when you pop in to hang out with Adora.” Catra counters, tapping the end of a red pen against one of her fangs before making another mark on the paper in front of her. “Besides, I needed you to look at that and I figured you’d be hiding in here, your majesty.” She looks up, her eyes twinkling with mirth. Glimmer sighs and rubs her eyes. Couldn’t really argue with that, and she knows the more she does, the more Catra will act like a brat about this. 

“Fine, whatever, but get off my bed before you get ink on the sheets. Just use my desk like a normal person." Tail flicking, the magicat glances between the desk and Glimmer, before shrugging. Something about this didn’t feel right. Catra hated doing paperwork, and there was something Glimmer can’t quite read, a smug air to her posture. Narrowing her eyes, she looks at the woman. Catra merely smiles back, before making a circle on something.

“Y’know, I considered doing that, but this feels like more a _bed_ sort of thing.” The strange choice of words tumble through Glimmer’s head, and then it clicks. Glancing back at her desk, it’s suspiciously bare of a stack that had been there so long Glimmer had stopped registering its presence. Whipping her head around, Catra meets her shocked glare with a gleeful smile. With a flash of magic, Glimmer’s on the other woman, tackling her and making a grab for the paper in her hand. 

“Catra, what the fuck! Those are private!” she growls, and the magicat rolls flexibly out of her grasp, laughing gleefully.

“I’ll say they are!” she says, and Glimmer finds a treacherous flush crawling over her cheeks. She starts grabbing the papers scattered around the blankets, avoiding Catra’s knowing gaze. After half a second, though, she slows down as flashes of red catch her eyes. Catra hasn’t just been reading her secret stories, she’d been vandalizing them! Fury flashes quick and hot through her, and she feels her hands balling into fists, but just as quickly it’s replaced with a chill.

Catra had found her stories where Glimmer had blatantly wrote _elaborate erotic fantasies_ about her. She had every right to go through them to remove that from the record. Because they weren’t just Glimmer’s stories. They were her stories _starring Catra._ Steading herself with a breath, she glances down at all the Xs on one page and lets it drop.

“Listen, I know this looks.. Messed up, but I can explain.” Glimmer starts. Catra doesn’t even dignify her with looking up. Frowning, she tries again. “Catra, please… “ 

“No, no, I get it. Well, not the shoes, that was a weird choice. When have I ever worn shoes, Sparkles?” Catra asks, before circling something with her red pen. A smirk flits over her lips. “Or should I say Shimmer?” 

Glimmer’s positive her cheeks are incandescent. “Oh, fuck off. I was a kid! Sort of… It seemed … ugh!” She resumes collecting the scattered works, before spotting the rest of the stack sitting by Catra’s hip. Smacking her hand away, Catra growls, circling her tail around the papers. 

“Nope, I haven’t got to them yet. Leave ‘em.” she snaps. Glimmer’s soul rebels at the treatment, before her conscience reminds her that it was only fair to let the other woman see all... this. Bow had, after all, and Adora, and they were only secondary characters. Catra was always the main event. Glancing over the pages, the marks on them glare up at her, like an accusation. 

“So, what, crossing out all the dirty bits?” she asks, her voice low. Catra snorts, and clicks her tongue. 

“Fixing all the grammar and spelling mistakes. Honestly, what the fuck is this punctuation? How do you even get one decree out if this is how you write?” she snarks. A quick check shows that the magicat wasn’t lying. The paper in Catra’s hands has corrections over the scratched out words, commas and periods added in and crossed off, and one case with an entire sentence underlined with ???? written in the margin. Reading over it, it _was_ a little hard to follow, Glimmer supposes. Shifting closer, she watches. 

“Bow never noticed those,” Glimmer says, more to make conversation than anything else. The atmosphere had grown strangely soft and intimate, and she wasn’t sure how to feel about the silence. Catra snorts out a quick little laugh.

“Arrow Boy loves you, glitter butt. He just didn’t want to point out the mistakes because he’s too damn nice. Lucky for you, I’m an asshole.” The silence returns, broken only by a rustle of papers and the swish of a pen. This time, Catra breaks it. “Has Adora read these too?”

“Only some. Like, the first two or three. But after a bit she was just too busy for them. Or too nice to tell me they were garbage,” Glimmer gives a dry little laugh. “Don’t worry, she didn’t see any of virgin me’s incredibly inaccurate fantasies with her childhood friend. I can’t _believe_ I thought I was being smooth with the names back then.” 

“Felina is pretty awful, but not as bad as the meows. You _know_ I don’t sound like that, your highness.” Catra notes, and then sends Glimmer a wink that makes a shiver run down her spine. Glimmer quickly looks away, angry with herself. Catra definitely didn’t mean it like that. “In fact, given how thin the walls are in this joint, you know exactly what I sound like, now.” Nope, clearly she _did._

“Whatever. I was young and stupid. Very very stupid. And now I know you better.” Shaking her head, Glimmer laughs. “Anyway, these weird ass power fantasies didn’t survive me having to deal with the real thing, after….” Her words trail off, and the silence goes from cozy to brittle. Uncomfortable. Shifting, Catra pauses. Glimmer startles as a softness brushes her wrist, before wrapping around it. The magicat isn’t even looking at her, but now her tail is wrapped around Glimmer’s arm.

“I’m sorry about that.” the woman says, her voice flat. Her tail squeezes, then lets go, retreating to curl around her legs. Sighing, Glimmer moves a bit closer. 

“Yeah, I know. You always say. It’s okay, you don’t need to every time I bring her up.” she reminds Catra, and the woman nods stiffly. 

“Mmm.. still.” A ghost of a smile spreads over her lips, but amber and blue eyes remain subdued. “Guess the real thing wasn’t as fun as Felina, huh…” 

Glimmer shrugs, not waiting to lie. “Well, I did stop writing these after… after mom died. So yeah, for a bit, I would have agreed.” Moving across the messy sheets, she sorts through the stack beside the now quiet magicat. Catra makes no move to stop her. It takes a moment, but the story is pretty easy to find, the papers a brighter white than the rest. She shoves it in Catra’s hands, exchanging it for the now forgotten paper the feline was proofreading.

“Here. I wasn’t exactly.. I didn’t really have the experience, before then, to write this sort of thing properly. But I’m pretty happy with this one.” she says, ducking her head to catch Catra’s eyes. They flick from her, to the papers, and Catra sighs. A bit of the light comes back to her face.

“I hope it's better, there’s only so many times Felina could tie Shimmer up before it gets boring.” she quips. Glimmer rolls her eyes, and sits back. Catra’s pen hovers for a minute, and Glimmer is disappointed that she immediately marks two errors, but it slows as her eyes move down the page. The smug little smile melts away into a strange blankness, and she moves on to the next, setting the pen down. Glimmer’s stomach twists. Somehow, that was so much worse than seeing Catra laughing at her bad writing. The minutes tick forward, and all Glimmer can hear is her pulse in her ears, roaring away. 

“This… is new, isn’t it.” Catra’s voice is soft, distant. Hesitant in a way Glimmer rarely saw from her, not since Prime. That side of her was usually reserved for Adora and Adora only.

“Mmm, yeah. Yeah, it is.” Glimmer confirms. She’d been writing it all week, with a little moral support from Bow. It had been intended to be the capstone on that secret past of hers, a swansong to her old dreams. Even Bow hadn’t been privy to _all_ of it, though he knew how it ended. 

Nodding, the magicat goes quiet, focused completely on the work in her hands. Her lips flutter a few times, and Glimmer thinks she can make out the lines Catra is muttering along with. Catra’s own words, in many cases, now in Felina’s mouth. 

It’s not that Glimmer couldn’t be creative, and in a way, this story still was, taking things from their life and painting the veneer of her unusual fantasy world over it, full of intrigue and wit. She could make an original story, and she'd come up with hundreds of lines for Felina before. But these stories were always about what Glimmer wished she could do, could be, could say. And there were a lot of those moments, seeped with regret, she was able to draw from now. She now had a better source to work from.

Even without the new paper and casual handwriting and, hopefully, better grasp of spelling, Catra _must_ know this was a very recent work. Because now Shimmer and Felina were playing out, beat for beat, the real things that had happened in their past. The pain of Glimmer losing her mother, the struggles with her friends were still there. But now they were better, smoother, still with the pain, but the ugliness shaved off, the mistakes dulled. And Felina was no longer the one note villain. Glimmer had worked hard on that, melting the tropes from before into the woman she’d come to know. The wicked nemesis had her own struggles.

Clearing her throat, Catra glances at her, and then back at the story. “It’s… it’s pretty good, I guess. Like, how.. You had them talking through the bars. And… and what you .. I mean Shimmer said. You have a way with words, Sparkles.” Glimmer looks away, playing with the hem of her cape. After everything Catra had gone through, and everything after Glimmer had learned, she’d wished she’d been… kinder back then. More willing to listen. To reach out. And maybe she made her nemesis a little more willing to talk back. Catra didn’t seem to be complaining. 

It wasn’t exact, of course. Especially since Adora put in so much of the work to bring Catra back. Catra’s redemption was never Glimmer’s story to tell. But on paper, in this weird universe her younger, naïve self built for her hopes and dreams, _Shimmer_ could make that first step. So when the two characters finally teamed up to take down the sinister head of the galactic mafia, there was only one thing Glimmer could think of. She risks a glance at Catra, expecting a blush, or a frown, or _something_. She gets nothing but twitches of the magicat’s tail and flicks of her ears that she can’t interpret. 

Finally, Catra straightens up the pages, and sets them aside, before running her claws harshly through her short mane. It’s almost long enough to pull back, and Glimmer’s caught her trying, but it's not there yet. 

“Bow know you wrote this?” Catra asks, getting straight to the point. Glimmer nods. 

“Yeah. Don’t worry. I don’t hide anything from him.” The other woman nods. Shifting to wake up her slumbering legs, Glimmer adds, “I’m kinda surprised _that’s_ what got you worried, not, you know, all the sex I used to write about.” 

“It was a pretty important kiss.” And Glimmer can’t argue there. Because while the sloppy daydreams of her younger self were just that, the kiss was something very real. She likes to think she got that scene exactly right, given how many times she heard the story from Catra and Adora since it happened. Shrugging, she wonders how to explain, and if she even should.

“It’s… not what I want now. Well, not entirely. There’s a lot of things in my past I wish I had a do-over for. But that… it just felt like that was the right ending for them, even if it was different than the one we got.” Catra raises an eyebrow, and Glimmer elaborates, “The characters I made back when I had a crush on a woman I didn’t even properly know.”

Black claws flex out, and for a heartbeat Glimmer’s terrified Catra will shred the story, but she merely taps them on her thigh. The corner of her mouth twitches in not even a smile, before it vanishes again. 

“Yeah, you’re right. They were really passionate about each other. It’s what would have made sense for them. I’m glad you didn’t make it too close, though, that would have felt weird. Also, Shimmer absolutely wouldn’t have made the first move to kiss like that.” And now it was a proper smile with fangs and mirth. “She was _such_ a bottom.” 

Rolling her eyes, Glimmer snorts indignantly. “She was MY CHARACTER, Catra, I think I know what she would have done.” Catra taps her on the nose with a claw, just enough to poke, and winks.

“I don’t know about that, Shimmer, I feel like I’m pretty familiar with the bitch myself now.” Glimmer takes a swing at her and Catra leans back, laughing, letting the fist swoosh past. “And I gotta say, the real version is nowhere near as cool as advertised.”

“What’s that, Felina, did you say you want me to rub your tail entirely the wrong way, because I’m pretty sure that’s what I heard.” Glimmers says, making a dive for the appendage with Catra kicking and growling until they both tumble off the bed. 

Laughing, Catra flings an errant pillow at her and Glimmer ducks, grinning, before grimacing. 

“Ow ow ow shit okay leg… “ she whines, as the pins and needles hit her. Amazingly, the magicat accepts the time out, getting up to gather the papers and take them back over to the desk while Glimmer tries to massage her leg back to life. By the time she’s able to stand, both her bed and her visitor look more composed.

“Are you going to tell Adora about the whole… “ Glimmer asks, gesturing wildly in the air. Catra gives her an easy shrug.

“Depends, Sparkles, you going to confess your undying love any time soon?” she asks with a smile that doesn’t quite hit her eyes. Glimmer quickly shakes her head, and a thread of tension unwinds in the magicat, her tail going slack. 

“Then no. I think Adora made it clear how comfortable she was with your little fantasies before, even if she probably didn’t know why she didn’t like them. I don’t need to mess with her head that way.” Catra says, making a show of checking her claws. “We’re… we’re not where you and Bow are, not yet. Like, I never knew how you could deal with him making googoo eyes at Sea Hawk all the time, but I think I get it now.” Glimmer nods. Her and Bow had a comfortable relationship _now_ , but it took time and work to get there. 

“Okay. I never meant for you to read all that, and you _really_ shouldn’t be nosing through my papers, but I felt like you deserved to see how it ended.” Glimmer says. Catra gives her a lopsided smile, nodding, but if it’s in agreement of her words or just in general, she can’t tell.

“Hey, like I said, I get it. You think you’re the only person who had weird little stories in their head?” Catra counters, and now her smile seems shy. Glimmer is surprised, yet not after a second’s thought.

“I guess you always had this sort of stuff running through your head, what ifs with you and Adora,” she replies. Catra’s smile quirks. 

“Yeah, mostly her, but not always.” Glimmer’s mind cycles through Scorpia and Lonnie and… Catra gives her a wink, and she groans, reaching for the lost pillow. 

“Oh fuck off, hairball, no teasing me about th…” she starts, and Catra holds up her hands, ears back.

“Hey! Hey, I’m not saying… I ever stopped feeling what I felt for Adora, but, you know, I wasn’t exactly messing with Bow back then. Just you. So… yeah.” Under the thin fur, Glimmer sees an actual blush, but she knows if she mentions it, that would be the end of this fragile moment, so she bites back a comment. Catra’s tail twitches, and she groans, rubbing her arm. “Listen, just because you wrote me all weird doesn’t mean I didn’t get what you were feeling then. That’s all I want to say.”

“Okay.” Glimmer says. She imagines this’ll make things weird for a while, but it’s always been a little weird. There were always things between them that the others were never quite privy to. She doesn’t think Catra’s given Adora an explanation for their tendency to face away from each other, back to back, when they need to have a serious talk. And Bow’s never heard about some of the stuff they’d talked about, stuck on the ship together. Catra fingers drag through her mane again, and she sighs. 

“Right. The stories.. They’re not bad. Especially the last one, Sparkles. You did good. And… it’s not the ending we got, but it’s still a good ending. They’re good for each other. You made sure of that.” Another nod, and Catra hops on the windowsill, before heading off and away to wherever the magicat went when she wanted to think. Glimmer watches her go. She tidies the bed, freeing the red pen from where it was gleefully staining their blanket. She goes through the work Catra brought her, finishing it quickly, and fixes her hair. The shadows grow deeper as the daymoon slips low in the sky, and she lights the candles with a flick of her wrists, before turning on her lamp. 

At some point, Bow slips in, planting a kiss in her hair and peering over her head as she works. 

“What’s this?” he asks, his arms draped lazily around her shoulders as he watches her pen move across a clean sheet of paper. Glimmer gestures to the proofread version spread around her, heavy with crimson.

“Catra read my stories and had some ideas for corrections so I figured, if we’re going to put them in that nice chest you’re making, I might as well make them the best versions.” Bow doesn’t ask how Catra reacted, and Glimmer loves that about him. He’ll just assume that it worked out for the best. She can only imagine the confusion and misunderstandings there would be if Adora had been in his position. But as Catra said, Adora and her weren’t where Bow and Glimmer were with this sort of stuff. _Yet._

Glimmer puts that out of her mind for the moment as she carefully copies over the correct spelling of ‘syndicate’. Deep inside, her younger self smiles.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I blame all the gays in one of my discord servers than keep encouraging me to write Glitra, especially Maggie, Julie, Bleep and Kylie


End file.
